George Rebane
CARB met yesterday to establish California’s cap n’ tax carbon trading program. RR readers are aware of how people who passed Econ 101 feel about this mournful event. (For details and analysis of its larger impact, see Russ Steele’s report on NCMW.)
Meanwhile, the progressives are besides themselves with glee. Half of them are happy that California’s ‘Global Warming Solutions Act’ aka AB32 will nudge us back toward the stone age, and the remaining dimwits remind me of the Cargo Cult natives of Papua-New Guinea. These poor souls gathered on mountain tops after WW2 where they built crude wooden replicas of the DC-3s that America used to supply its Pacific forces fighting the Japanese. The cargo airplanes brought in marvelous things the natives had never seen before, and for a little while that changed their lives. Now they were trying to attract more of these magical mechanical birds out of the sky filled with all kinds of good stuff. Such futile ceremonies went on for years.
Our ceremonies are just beginning. To many of us it is beyond belief that hereabouts otherwise normal looking people believe we can create jobs manufacturing competitive green tech or ‘cleantech’ products that can be sold worldwide. In that category China, India, and even Germany are miles ahead of us. With our coddled and overpaid workers, it will be near impossible to make and sell anything competitively on the world markets.
The only cleantech jobs that CARB’s new mandates will enable are those created from the ‘government gun to our head’ that force us to buy and install overpriced and unnecessary equipment for our homes and businesses. Much of this stuff is to be installed by properly licensed workers who will command outlandish wages for their efforts and our detriment. The bottom line is that the Great California Exodus will accelerate.
The simple economics of the matter is that you can’t arbitrarily add requirements and attendant costs to boost an economy. For example, mandating that all internal walls of California’s buildings now must first receive an undercoat of specially processed purple paint to be applied by specially licensed union painters will not boost California’s economy, no matter how many purple paint painters are now out there putting on such undercoats.
However, in socialist economics this is a perfectly valid way for the government to stimulate an economy in doldrums. That it hasn’t worked in communist countries and it didn’t work here during the Great Depression is beside the point. Such historical facts are proscribed in our schools and never mentioned in the lame stream media. Bring on the purple paint and the purple paint painters.
rebanesruminations.com 
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